gnostic and Gnostic

[Dave Monroe]

I think that's what we've largely been saying, Paul, Otto, myself, maybe
even Mr. jbor there.   But in the latter and my (though not only my)
apparently endless knifefight over particulars, I reiterate, beware any
easy slippage from (Nietzschean to Heideggerian to) Derridean to
Pynchonian "deconstructions" (not, I no doubt should have noted,
"deconstruction," "Deconstruction," and I'll again iterate both the
differances and diffferends gaining betwixt Derrida and Lyotard).  But
those "family resemblances," indeed ...

"Generalizations" (s/z, vive le differance ...), "quibble," "suits,"
"purposes," no guiltier thereof than, at any rate.   But let us do read
each other closely, responsibly, shall we?  To (re)iterate myself: "I
mighty not have been as clear"--obviously, apparently ...--"on my
agreement avant la lettre with Otto here"--and, apparently, jbor?--"on a
sort of generalized "deconstruction" as an emergent feature of (at
LEAST) the 60s as I was on my acknowledgement that Pynchon was very
unlikely to have been influenced by Derrida's particular
deconstruction(s), even by the writing of Gravity's Rainbow"--pub. 1973,
but in progress at least since the pub. of V. a decade earlier--"and,
certainly, not before"--not before the writing of Gravity's Rainbow,
that is, the pub. of V.--"(that initial salvo of Derridean texts
published in France in 1966)"--and most not pub. in English trans. 'til
over a half decade later, at earliest; though JD certainly did present
that paper @ JHU in 1966, it wasn't widely available, if one can call
any pub. of the proceedings of an academic conference "widely
available," 'til, what, 1972? "but, well, agreed,"--that sort of
parallel marsupial/mammal, similartity w/out genaelogy, evolution--"as
well."

Which I THINK means, as Paul suggests, that we're roughly (approximately
and/or brusquely) in agreement in that regard.  "Have all been called
into question and that Pynchon is aware of this and revels in it,"
indeed, indeed THAT Pynchon calls "unity, congruence, the subject,
nature, very nature, origins" ("logocentrism" I'll leave as Derrida's
particular concern) "into question," and there might remain our
difference, differences, differances, differends (incommensurable with
"incommensurability"?), perhaps, even ...

Reminds me, though, if "deconstruction" "isn't *just* a game," what then
(else) is it?  Again, I do not disagree, but that doens't necessarily
mean I agree with what might come next, either.  Intersecting curves do
not necessarily coincide otherwise, no?  And I'll leave in place my
caveats about jumping from all those capital letter variables to all
those other capital letter variables, about writing all those
questionable equations, as they are logically valid warnings about
invalid logics, ogics which do seem to come into play here from time to
time ...

But I'll also reiterate that, even given Pynchon's apparently voracious
appetite for, ingestion, absorption, and even excretion of, ideas 'n'
info-mation--and given my own predilection to make any such intertextual
connection that can be made--(even) I find it rather less likely that
Pynchon was directly influenced by Derrida than that they shared common
intellectual ancestors in Nietzsche, Heidegger, perhaps even Sartre, and
evolved rather in parallel than in series in that epistemological,
social, political and so forth hothouse of the 1960s ...

That ref. to Deleuze and Guattari in Vineland does make one wonder about
that magical mystery year of 1968, however, but ... but, hey, by at
LEAST the time I was Pynchon's age at the pub. of V.--indeed, years
earlier--I was already knee-deep in deconstruction, gnosticism,
modernism, postmodernism, information theory, cybernetics, physics,
WWII, Pynchon, even, so ... so can I characterize this most recent
exchange as a violent agreement of sorts?  Hm ...

But, again ("a hidden flickknife flicks"--Generation X) to violently
agree,  I do think the writing of deconstruction, at least, is not only
as much a demonstration of how a text deconstructs even, esp. as it
ostensibly constructs itself, but might well be charaterized as, if,
esp., not as a reconstruction, a reconfiguration of the deconstructed
text.  JD's "Limited Inc a b c ..." is exemplary in this regard, a
veritable knifefight (cuts, slashes, slices, lacerations, and subsequent
suturings) with John Searles' "Reiterating the Differences" ...but
before (?) this becomes West Side Story here ...